...in the bombshine

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly in the "Revolution/Revelation" issue.

Look! a book review

Got a new review up on The Rumpus -- Mike Young's story collection Look! Look! Feathers. As much as I'm a writer and a reviewer or whatever, I'm hesitant to recommend anything for people to read. Maybe because most people only read books about vampires or zombies. Maybe because I'm one of the last pretentious dicks who thinks you should read poetry on a regular basis. Maybe I'm hungover. Definitely hungover. Anyways, if you read one book that's come out in 2010, read this book. It's awesome. It's funny. It's not about vampires. It captures the zeitgeist, whatever the fuck that means. That's my spiel, take it or leave it. Just take it.

Omne Vivum Ex Ovo

We got high and watched the morsel of tinned apricot sink between the broken recesses of heaven, the streaky clouds burning in golden veins. Actually, we were at Wendy’s. My brother didn’t like me. He was older and had a shitty case of acne, the only kid in our family who did. Because of this, his mind was untroubled by philosophy. He bathed in antifreeze. He ate lard like air. His girlfriend had scabies and he liked to “tongue-punch her meat wallet.” Seated across from me in the red pleather Wendy’s booth, he flicked that same tongue, hurled a dollop of Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger onto its wrapper and slid the wrapper toward me. “Piggy,” he said, “tell the scarecrow-assed bitch at the counter that this is cold.” I just sat there, staring at the gray, half-chewed glob. My brother tightened his knuckles, gave me that look. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to wriggle in it like a slug drowning in salt rain.

Hello, Small Awesome Book

Hello, Darkness by Howie Good

from Deadly Chaps

pub date: July 2010

33 pages

Though Howie Good’s recent chapbook, Hello, Darkness is advertised as a collection of both poetry and prose, the distinction is a superficial, almost pointless question for Form 101. Good is a poet, a damn nice one, and his book is no slouch either.

It’s a disturbing and sublime jaunt to the brain’s bleary edge, the spaces in between, those gaps in the synapses that are only illuminated by “the sort of stuff you think about late at night.” That dark, naked hour before the dreams set in. The book’s 31 pieces (ranging in size from a ten-word pebble to a Facebook update) drip with quiet tension and an Anthrax-dipped apprehension of all the random shit that might go down. Of what usually does.

Unforeseen happenings drown in the chaos of an anything-goes half-awake where the scope of what’s contemplated ranges from the pleasantly esoteric (the length of a pig orgasm, a circus strongman who quotes Kafka) to the paranormal (rabbis flying in mini-vans) to the incredibly eerie (a famous historical figure’s genitalia impaled by an arrow, a former student’s body is found because of the odor emanating from it). The specters that are supposed to remain along the edges have crept to the forefront of the heretofore familiar.

                                     

But the journey to darkness isn’t just a passive one. The book’s longer poems are possessed of a distinctly self-aware personality that plays the dual role of imaginative observer and deadly participant: “Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.” To follow the voice is to entertain the possibility of an evil that may not be the lesser of two (or three), but one that surely offers the best chance at revelatory potential, a long look at the sun without glasses, at tasting what’s really behind the curtain. It could be worse. This glimmer of morbid clarity is summed up wonderfully in the concluding lines of “Dance of the Iron Shoes,” one of the collection’s best: “Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening enough just for me to see what wasn’t there.” And enough for the reader to see what is.

Yet Good, in my opinion, excels most brilliantly on the smallest of canvases. That one super-packed moment, unsprung like a shockwave, a zen-slap to the spinal cord: “Bombs Kill 95 / the headline says / beside the sunflowers / in a milk bottle”.

Hello, darkness. I think I’d like to hang out with you, too.

2010?

Got a new short story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly called "American Hubris." The theme for this week's issue is "The Year in Review." When I thought of 2010, three images came to mind. Oil, flashing computer screens, and people being self-centered dicks. Let's see if all that comes through. The dick part probably will.

Four Poems

*

the bottle makes its slow trek

across the table

and I let it fall

quietly to the floor

*

chewing gum, popping it loudly

iPod static

I thought I might kill him

*

we waited

in her bedroom,

smoking

*

trucks, black trucks

bellowing across the shit-towns

bearing loads

Don't Look At The Cameras!!!

I've got a new review/essay up at The Brooklyn Rail. Check it out. In it, I detail why David Bajo's newest book "Panopticon" isn't the best thing I've read this year, but why it also freaked the shit out of me. It's all about surveillance cameras and how sinister nerds can basically steal your life and make a twisted movie out of it. I did some research and found out that not only is the technology very real, it's probably happening to you, to me, to the guy on the subway with two different sneakers, right NOW. The world is quickly becoming like Minority Report. Oh well, 2012 is coming up. Can't get too much worse before then, right?